The Old Prospector stopped by my place yesterday. I knew right away he’d been biding time in Rosa’s Cantina. Again. So I went to the shed and pulled the canvas wrap off the jug, and we had a snort or two of Early Times, for New Times’ sake. Just to keep his spirits up.

Told me he’d been down East, in Key West, Florida, doing some night tarpon fishing and eating oysters on the half-shell. Based on his gait, I suspected he’d been fishing for Wild Turkeys as well.

OP told me he’d heard news on the flats off Key West about a $600,000 “traffic study” being commissioned by the ELP City Council. Said he got it off Marine Band 16, the distress channel. Asked what I knew about it.

Well, I don’t know much, I said. All I know is what I read online. I hear Britney Spears is in custody court again.

OP snorted, then snorted a sniff of my priceless brew, which is priceless because no one will pay for it. He said he sympathized with Eddie Holguin on the East Side, despite OP’s mule-strong prospector prejudices, but mainly because he and Eddie liked to play the horses together at Sunland Park.

“He’s got a point,” said OP, eyeing a pothole on Redd Road that increases its diameter by an inch every time a city bus passes over it.

“You know,” said OP, “there’s a hole 30 miles outside of Houston that just opened up. “I reckon it’s all the oil and gas they done drilled out of the area.”

He looked at me with a keen eye.

I got the hint.

I said so much as how everytime an El Paso politician gets a gleam in his eye, we get a sinkhole in our wallets.

“Zactly,” said OP. “They can spray paint all the lines in the road they want, but don’t mean nobody’s gonna come and work on the road.”

I thought about the now-fading spray paint on the street in front of my house, and offered OP another snort.

Then I casually mentioned the name Wayne Grinnell, casually because OP had taken out his Winchester Model 1892 Trapper to clean it. “This fella Wayne Grinnel,” I said, before shutting up real quick-like.

“He was around in 1981, or thereabouts,” said OP, eyeing me like a target on a rifle range. “He’s an apologist for New Mexico. Thinks they’ll overtake El Paso in population, money and economy.”

“So he’s crazier than an outhouse rat,” I offered.

OP didn’t answer, but he also didn’t swing the Winchester toward me. I took this as a positive, and cautiously lifted a glass to my lips.

Then I asked about Avocadoan and its observation on NIMBYness.

OP spit. “NIMBY!” he exclaimed. “Nobody knows how rich or poor the Upper Valley is! Half the people there are Caucasoid elites who would be middle-class and blue-collar in any major city. Yet here they think they’re as rich as Monte Carlo expatriates. Hell, I once ran an investment firm in the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco fer seven figures a year — and you don’t see me slinging mud at the jornaleros. The other half are working barber shops and doing landscaping as a second job. Problem is, Ann Morgan-dash-Lilly can’t figure out which lobby to pander to: the fantasizing whites or the up-and-coming browns.”

I left OP to stew in his own ethnic color palette for a minute while I checked my stocks online. When I headed back out to the tack house, he was already saddled up, and moseying out the gate in his usual fashion of nearly falling off while expertly guiding his horse to the nearest bar.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said, with only a slight slur. “When’s your next batch of hooch due?”

“In 2011,” I said, hoping to see him them.

Check out this cartoon. Then check out the landscape of El Paso. The cartoonist is so taken with the horror of the planned border fence (whether real or virtual) that s/he doesn’t see the irony in their own back yard.

El Paso is littered with rock walls. Practically every home has a wall surrounding its back yard. Businesses are divided by them. Streets and schools enjoy the coolness of the shadows they provide. FBI agents lurk behind them, looking for the next bribe-taking local yokel politician stumbling toward a wad of cash.

Fact is, El Paso is the embodiment of the sentiment expressed in this cartoon: it seems people think that some problems in El Paso can apparently be solved by building rock walls everywhere.

If they don’t think that, then why do they build so many of them?

–Walls to keep out news of suicidally-drunk underage teenage drivers screaming down Country Club at three in the morning.

–Walls to keep us from seeing the legion of abused and neglected pets in our unthinking neighbors’ yards.

–Walls to keep us from viewing the latest TAKS scores from our next generation of geniuses (or bribe-takers).

–Walls to hide us from the view of white and African-American beggars at street-corners, selling candy and bullshit at Airway & Montana, Fred Wilson & 54, or Redd & North Desert.

–Walls to keep out the latest bad news of the antics of the Commissioners Court.

And one more thing. The author of the article, listed as a Professor Emeritus at Sul Ross, should go back to school. His analogy to the Berlin Wall misses on a main point: it was East Germany that erected that wall, not West Germany. To bring his fantasy to reality, then, it would be Mexico building the wall on the Southwest Border, not the United States.

Well, “emeritus” means “retired” in academic circles, and for that, we can come out from around our own wall, and be thankful.

So ASARCO got their air quality permit, thanks to the State of Taxes Texas.

An air quality permit is not the same as a politically-accurate permit asserting that the quality of air emitted by Texas bureaucrats is any finer than the sublime perfumes of the nearest stockyard.

It’s just a permit, and permits are permitted, by law and by the very nature of the word.

That’s the reality of how home-grown carpetbaggers roll in The Lone Stud State.

Thus, despite our potentially-choked lungs and could-be lead-laden watery eyes (or not), and surrounded by our devoted MS-afflicted offspring and our three-legged dogs, we are pushing through with a series of parodies. The first comes now, and why did ASARCO make it so easy for us?

Now here’s a world-class ASARCO original ™ ad, suitable for parody naked adulation. Note the dramatic effect of black-and-white postering, which is not to say it’s fascist in design, as there are no red spot color calls that would complete the Teutonic Triumvirate of black-white-red (often used by Nazis, South American political parties, Chicano farm workers movements and beret-wearing, scooter-riding, grandma-killing commie Guevaristas (which is the same as at least one Obama campaign worker). The designer could have just had a bad day. What with the bankruptcy and uncertainty over pay stubs, it’s possible ASARCO had to cull the bottom of the advertisorial barrel for a graphic artist who would work in exchange for stock futures. Which is not to say the Artist was a punk, except s/he could have been just a tad desperate. Or s/he could have been a corporate wonk alarmingly left alone with PowerPoint of a frantic afternoon, with a 5 p.m. deadline to fax ad thumbnails to Guadalupe or Rio de Right Wing, Argentina, or Hull, or Kosovo, or wherever ASARCO decides its off-shore corporate HQ is this week. (Click for full-sized badness):

And here’s our new ad, built during an all-nighter in between coughing jags, blood tests for lead poisoning at the ER, and furious phone consultations with both lead poisoning specialists at the Mayo Clinic and alcohol-poisoning specialists at Acetunas (click for full-sized goodness and click again for print-sized wonderfulness, if your so-called Internet browser supports that):

Later on, once we’ve exhausted all medical approaches to our health issues as well as creative approaches to parodying ASARCO, we’re going to explore other reasons for Mayor Crook’s Cook’s opposition to the re-opening of ASARCO. Can anyone say “land grab?”

Can anyone say, “FBI El Paso Corruption Investigation?” We knew you could.

El Paso Times reports on the traffic problems being generated by the new outlet mall at I-10 and Loop 375, over on the Westside.

It shouldn’t be news. City, county and state planners haven’t thought well about the Westside, choosing instead to parcel out parcels of land for rapid development, all around ASARCO and the rural clime of the Upper Valley. Irritating issues like quality of life, pollution, competent flood protection and transport networks have not been allowed to stand in the way of the rapid growth of tax income.

The Old Prospector stopped by my place yesterday. I knew right away he’d been biding time in Rosa’s Cantina. Again. So I went to the shed and pulled the canvas wrap off the jug, and we had a snort or two, for New Times’ sake.

Told me he’d rode past ASARCO, the once-again wannabe smelter west of Central. Told me again that he couldn’t figger out the black soil around there, including how it runs along the embankment of the I-10 near UTEP. I told him I don’t know, but I don’t like it, even if it’s not the smelter’s fault that the city grew up around it. I guess they tried well enough back in the day to keep the stench and the birth defects away from Central. But no one expected that the Yuppie-esque West Side would spring up, and legions of thin wives would troop in leggings to 24-hour fitness centers in between bitching about EPISD and dipping tea-bags into tepid cups of upscale Target china in the middle of their xeriscaped back yards.

And then I said that black color ain’t natural to the geology around here.

O.P. said he’d heard of Summer Luciano’s recent problems at ASARCO and Rosa wasn’t too happy about it. She blamed the downfall of her Cantina on ASARCO, though we all new better, and that it was really on account of that song.

I said I don’t know anything about that, because I don’t know any people who would name their kids after a season like Summer anyway, or willingly suffer pollution from a smelter getting dragged through their evaporative coolers right into their kitchens and bedrooms and sissy-girl nostrils.

That led, curiously, not into a debate on smelters, but rather into a discussion about crazy names people give their kids, although “Summer” isn’t too extreme by California time. There’s the Urban Legend about an Alabama couple naming their kid Formica Dinette, of course. And then there are those who name their kids April, though month-naming kind of drops off after that. November Valdez, anyone? That’s uncommon. Met a gal named Maya, once. That’s easy on the ears, but made no sense because it was attached to a hippie white girl from the West Coast who looked about as Mayan as a Maori warrior looks at home in Stockholm. I asked after her sister Inca but got a blank look.

There’s a whole class of people who name their kids in unusual ways. Sam becomes Sammuell; Summer becomes Sommere; and Santa Claus is sometimes recast as a red burkha-wearing Imam off Mesa named Dagjeep, huddling under a domed roof bitching on Friday about whatever it is that Muslims in El Paso don’t like about the locals. I expect several fatwas have been put out about how to properly name that little bundle-of-joy cum future homicide bomber who those proud parents have tucked inside that Koran-brand baby stroller.

And then there’s another class of people who mix Out-of-Africa-like language memes in the most amazing ways, concocting such Africanesque naming conventions as mixing Maasai syllables with Ogu spelling. So you get easily-pronounced names like Taneeka, Daschwanda or Latoya that totally miss any cultural connection with the US or, usually, with the people who got so branded.

On the other hand, our cultural connection with the jug was rapidly established. O.P. gave that he’d named his first kid Jack Daniels, his second Bullett Prospector and his third James Turkey Beam, even though they were all girls and eventually changed their handles, respectively, to Sara Lou, Desiree Coco and Latoya Taneeka as soon as they joined the Air Force and signed a contract with Playboy. Heard that story, did you?

I could relate. Though I’ve had no rugrats or future homicide bombers, I had named one of my colts Jagdeep Monstrosity, but as soon as he joined the Koranic Konvent of Kansas he became Sam Just Sam, although he kept his blinders and tack. That religion rode him harder than I ever would have, although he was largely pollution-free, in the ASARCO way.

Eventually, the mild afternoon turned to a pleasant purple evening in the desert, and O.P., with only minor difficulty, mounted his mule for the long trip home. He said he wanted to go study the Koran. I told him good luck even as I eyed the jug bulging from under his poncho. Told him to take a wide trail around ASARCO, at least until he knew Summer Luciano was safe and that ASARCO PR flack was back at home in one of the West Side enclaves where even suicide bombers fear to tread. “Watch out for them Neighborhood Watch signs and HOA regulations, you hear!” I shouted, as he ambled away.